Advertising

And where you say:
Any way, I don't defend comp, I just show that comp makes physics
derivable in arithmetic, and that if you do it in some way, (using the
logic of self-reference) you can extract a general theory of qualia,
with its quanta part that you can compare with nature, and so test
comp. And up to now, it fits well with the facts.

What the hell are you talking about? I don't mean to be John Clark
rude, but
honestly, I can't see at all how qualia can possibly emerge from
your theory,

Clark has no problem with computationalism. He has even defend the
idea that comp is the only possible theory, but he has a problem with
the first person indeterminacy.

Cheers, and still looking for "the answer",

You have to made it more precise.

Are you saying that the qualia problem refutes computationalism (a bit
like Craig says) ?
Are you saying that the qualia problem can be used to show that the
UDA is not valid?

Craig assumes the qualia, so he does not try to explain them. I find
this premature.

What would be an explanation of qualia which would satisfy you?

My opinion is that computationalism explains the most possible about
qualia, including the machine's feeling (qualia) that no theories at
all can explain them completely.

To be frank, I don't extend that explanation more than I need to
debunk the argument against comp and based on qualia. To debunk that
debunking, you have to provide a better explanation of qualia.

How does that comp-explanation of qualia work?
Hmm... I will avoid the math, and try to give you the gist of it.

Imagine you build a machine, and for some reason you want it being
quite independent of you, like a robot that you would send on some
Planet. On that planet there are many dangers, like acid rains, hole
in the grounds, dangerous tempest, etc.

So you program it with a basic instruction, with the shape: "whatever
happens to you, do anything you can do to avoid self-destruction, or
self-injuries.

You can program "self" without problem (ask more if interested). You
can provide to the robots many sensors, so that it can detect the
possible dangers. For example, they have a sort of skin, and when too
much acid attacks it, the brain get to cope with urgency warnings, and
the "do anything you can to avoid a possible self-destruction and miss
of the mission".

Now, in some "real" relatively to you, computational histories, that
robot is actually send on that planet, and in that story, at some
point, it get stuck in a crevasse and then it rains (acid rains!).

The robot has a complex software which is in some chaotic regime, with
many conflicting procedure (raised by too much universal goal of doing
whatever is possible to avoid self-destruction. It pull its leg to
escape the crevasse and the rain, but he got new warning of self-
destruction that he is programmed to avoid.

But eventually the rain ceases, and the robot succeed to escape the
hole, and to complete the mission. On Earth, he got some medal and was
interviewed by a philosopher.

The philosopher asks the robot if he/it:she enjoyed the mission, and
would do it again. The philosopher asked the robot to tell its story
when he was stuck under the acid rain, and if that was painful.

Now, the robot was able to behave like if some situation were
unpleasant or pleasant. He was, by learning, imitation or simple
inference inductive, using words like "pleasant" and "unpleasant" to
describe its memories of episodes which were accordingly containing
few slight warning (like "it is time to drink some oil"), or episodes
with much severe warnings (unpleasant).

The memorized experience, which involves quite complex third person
possible relations, is memorized as something experienced, true by
default (the robot did not wake up saying that is was a dream), and
which has a content, describable in a diary, for example. The qualia
will be the way many aspect of the (self-referential) situation, coded
in some way, is perceived by the person run by the robot's brain, and
they have to contain some feature impossible to prove. The philosopher
might try to convince the machine, that she has no qualia, but the
argument will have no value for the machine, as it would put a doubt
on not just its memories and their content, but on the existence of
the experience of having those memories. At that moment, the machine
will execute one loop more and conclude that the philosophers is
"obviously" wrong, because that contradict the current experience.

The qualia has two components/ Some information (yes, no, Washington,
Moscow, ...). It is a self-selection in some history, and the
experience related to the overall self-perception, including the
personal day-to-day history, the goal, the mission, etc.

This makes sense, as far as it has sense (which "we" believe in, when
sending the robot on the planet). The self-referentially robot, lost
on a Planet will be able to interrogate that sense, perhaps he will
try to change its software, to diminish the severity of useless
warnings, or cut them all together, like most commandant do when
piloting a plane.

The true qualia itself can be "defined" by the set of all histories,
with equivalent warnings and amounts of information, conflicting goals
(in this case).

You can be a human or a machine, in all case you need to be a poet to
describe the qualia. You will need music, images, words, movie, and
hoping the publics get enough similar experiences to relate with the
movie content.

The math just makes this precise, and with the most common definition
of knowledge, it shows that the universal machines already explain
that they know/infer something that they are unable to justify, with
all the many different nuances, and some match well the "qualia
problem".

I don't know if comp is true, but non-comp looks a bit like racism or
xenophobism.

It condemns a priori possible souls because it has not the right clothe.
This proves nothing of course.
Hope this help, though. Feel free to elaborate on your point.
Bruno

Dan

On Saturday, October 12, 2013 1:33:10 AM UTC-4, freqflyer07281972
wrote:
Sorry to resurrect such an old thread, but I think I'd like to
respond here:

On Saturday, November 10, 2012 4:32:16 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 10 Nov 2012, at 10:11, freqflyer07281972 wrote:
> Hey all on the list,
>
> Bruno, I must say, thinking of the UDA. The key assumption is this
> teleportation business, and wouldn't it really be quite Ockham's
> Razorish to simply conclude from the entire argument that the
> correct substitution level is, in principle, not only not knowable,
> but not achievable, which means:
>
> congratulations, you have found a convincing thought experiment
> proof that teleportation is impossible in any cases greater than,
> say, 12 atoms or so (give me a margin of error of about plus/minus
> 100) ...
No problem. UDA shows the equivalent propositions: (MAT is weak
materialism: the doctrine that there is a primitive physical reality)
COMP -> NOT MAT
MAT -> NOT COMP
NOT MAT or NOT COMP
I keep COMP as a working hypothesis, as I have no clue what really MAT
means or explains, and we don't find a contradiction, just a weirdness
close to quantum Everett.
> this is very reminiscent of the way that time travel theorists use
> some of godel's closed timelike curve (CTC) solutions to einstein's
> relativity to argue that time travel to the past is possible. The
> problem is, the furthest back you can go is when you made the CTC,
> and yet in order to make the CTC, the formal and physical conditions
> require that you already have to have a time machine. This, of
> course, leads to paradox, because in order to travel in the time
> machine in the first place, you have to have had a time machine to
> use as a kind of mechanism for the whole project.
But such loop can exist consistently in solution of the GR equation.
that's what Gödel showed. I don't think this was really a problem for
Einstein, as he said more than once, that time is an illusion. We
would say now that it is a machine mental construction, which obeys
the laws of machines.

But here we have the essence of the problem, I think. Simply because
the mathematics or the logics of a given
problem happens to state that something CAN occur, this is
absolutely no imposition upon nature that such things
MUST occur... we find certain things in mathematics that may or may
not correspond to reality. It is truly uncanny in the
ways that mathematics does correspond, absolutely no doubt or
argument. But what of all that stuff where
the math simply has nothing to say? How can you possibly derive
qualia from math without a bunch of basic
handwaving -- which is really what you are doing when you cite such
arguments as Bp & p.... etc etc.... it is
really a lot of handwaving nonsense that never gets close to the
issue at all...

I really love the idea of your theory of everything Bruno, I really
do, but when it comes to my next meal, or what I need to do with my
life, or what my next big decision is going to be, this is of no
help. BTW, if it's of any console, Craig's theory of everything
doesn't help me in the
same basic ways, so there... the thing is... all this stuff is about
abstraction, and yet life as lived is anything but abstraction...
all particularities matter, at every level, shouldn't a theory of
everything really be a theory of particularities and contingencies,
as they have been produced?
and not a theory of general particularities that no one is really
concerned about?

cheers,
Dan
>
> In the same way, I think, does your ingenious UDA lead not to the
> conclusion you want it to, (i.e. we are eternal numbers contained in
> the computation of some infinite computer) but rather the less
> appealing conclusion that, perhaps, the teleportation required in
> your entire thought experiment is simply impossible, for much of the
> same reasons as time travel is impossible.
But then we cannot be even quantum computer, because they can emulate
by a classical machine, and they too exist in the arithmetical realm.
Any way, I don't defend comp, I just show that comp makes physics
derivable in arithmetic, and that if you do it in some way, (using the
logic of self-reference) you can extract a general theory of qualia,
with its quanta part that you can compare with nature, and so test
comp. And up to now, it fits well with the facts.
>
> It's still an important result, but perhaps not as profound as you
> think if we admit that the teleportation required in your thought
> experiment is simply not possibly for purely naturalistic (and
> therefore not computational, or mechanistic) reasons.
But the you need to assume non comp. The non clonability is also easy
to derive from comp, as the matter which constitutes us is eventually
defined by the entire, non computable dovetaling.
But puuting the subst level so low that comp is false, force you to
use a strong form of non comp, where matter is not just infinite, but
have to be a very special infinite not recoverable in the limiting
first person indeterminacy. What you do is a bit like introducing an a
priori unintelligible notion of matter to just avoid the consequence
of a theory. Bilogy and its extreme redundancy and metabolic exchange
pleas for comp, as such redundancy and metabolisation would be
miraculous if not comp emulable. In fact we don't know in nature any
process not emulable by a computer, except for the consciousness
selection, like in the WM duplication, or in quantum everett.
You are logically right, but abandoning comp is premature, before
listening to the machine (AUDA).
I know that some aristotelians are ready for all means, to avoid the
neoplatonist consequences, but that is normal given the 1500 years of
authoritative arguments.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.